A quick response to Terence Blake’s “ACADEMIC TRAUMA OR NOETIC DREAM: on the vicissitudes of dialogue“.
[TB] “Readers may see my blog as just more froth in the prevailing sea of philo-babble, but my goal is more democratic (and more pedagogical), and I have made quite a few enemies in trying to de-esotericise the philosophies I discuss.”
{AK}: Who cares whether they think it’s frothy or not?!
[TB] “The almost universal form that this enmity takes is that of ignoring my very existence, of refusing to acknowledge my work or to cite me. This has nothing to do with my use of the blog form, as the same authors occasionally cite blog posts favourable to their cause.”
{AK}: It’s not worth worrying about. Individually, we never really get the level of responses we’d prefer. I don’t really have any expectations about it. It comes with the territory of individuality.
[TB] “Publicity, not dialogue, is their aim. Laziness, not openness, is their method. Tautological self-validation is their pay-off.”
{AK}: Usually, they’re not very good, and they know it.
[TB] “These people transpose the power structures of the university to discussion on the web. They seem to be unaware that academics talk of dialogue, its openness and pluralism in order to prevent it from happening. Dialogue would be too traumatic for them, and their careers are based on avoiding it, or repressing it.”
{AK}: It’s a lot of work, to even write the low-level stuff of bog-standard academic production. Such obligations of production, naturally reduce the time and energy available for Internet shenanigans. Due to the effects of networked compression, not all institutional modalities of discursive production fare well in the new electronic environments.
[TB] “In the neo-liberal university there is only one dialogue that counts in the last instance (to cite a cynical expression of the Laruelleans). Money talks to money, and deals are made on that basis.”
{AK}: Let them get on with it! It won’t make them any better, lol.
[TB] “Power, the power to make and to do, to think and to express oneself, does not count, and is actively discouraged. Anyone who has been to university has witnessed this obscene underside (to talk like Zizek) and its symbolic violence at work, and seen its casualties.”
{AK}: I don’t really care about any of that, Terence. When it is good, it’s good. When it isn’t, it’s not. Not worth having any expectations.